Richard Pynson in St Clement Danes

On 10 July 1506, a cordwainer named Roger Haryson rented a tenement on the south side of the Strand in the parish of St Clement Danes from the priory of St John of Jerusalem for an annual rent of £2 6s. 8d. On the same day the tenement adjoining on the west was leased for the same rent to Anthony Colet, pouchmaker. The neighbours to Colet's west and Haryson's east are named in the records, but the next few years saw no new leases that identified the neighbours of those neighbours, nor is either Colet or Haryson named as a former tenant in any later lease. It is therefore not easy to relate those two tenements to any fixed point – which is unfortunate, because Haryson's eastern neighbour was ‘Ricardi Pynson’. It is, however, possible to identify the contemporary occupants of a series of five tenements at the western extreme of the St John's Rents (which adjoined the bishop of Exeter's inn), and thus to determine that the Colet, Haryson, and Pynson tenements must have been somewhere to the east of what eventually became no. 222 Strand, which was about seventy yards west of Temple Bar. This conclusion is supported by the first colophon in which Pynson printed his address in English, in which he describes his 1493 printing house as being ‘at the temple barre. of london’ (STC 19212, I7v, my emphasis). The ‘at’ need not imply ‘adjoining’, but it suggests something rather closer than seventy yards.